it was her habit to build up laughter out of inadequate materials.

This I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected.

A man with a beard was always a little suspect anyway. You couldn't say you wore a beard because you liked a beard. People didn't like you for telling the truth. You had to say you had a scar so you couldn't shave.

And then we take a soldier and put murder in his hands and we say to him, "Use it well, use it wisely.

..it's awful not to be loved. It's the worst thing in the world...It makes you mean, and violent, and cruel.

I believe there are techniques of the human mind whereby, in its dark deep, problems are examined, rejected or accepted. Such activities sometimes concern facets a man does not know he has. How often one goes to sleep troubled and full of pain, not knowing what causes the travail, and in the morning a whole new direction and a clearness is there, maybe the results of the black reasoning. And again there are mornings when ecstasy bubbles in the blood, and the stomach and chest are tight and electric with joy, and nothing in the thoughts to justify it or cause it.

When we get these thruways across the whole country, as we will and must, it will be possible to drive from New York to California without seeing a single thing.